Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It's important to be clear what the Counter-Terrorism (Temporary Exclusion Orders) Bill 2019, which we are voting on today, will do. Under this bill, if it passes, this will be the state of the law: the minister could refuse to allow an Australian citizen back into the country, even though that person has committed no crime. That decision by the minister is not reviewable by any court or by anyone else, and the minister can keep on doing it again and again and again. In other words, if this legislation passes, the current Minister for Home Affairs has the capacity to say to someone who's travelling overseas: 'No, you are not entitled to come back to your family, to your home, even though you've committed no crime, and there are absolutely no checks and balances on that power. If you think I've made the wrong decision, you cannot do anything about it.'

We are seeing the rule of law slip out of our hands. Under this government, we are seeing—and have seen time and time again—some very basic principles of Australian democracy in our constitutional system getting trashed. Up until a little while ago, the idea was that if someone suspected you'd done something wrong you would get taken in front of a court and if you'd done the wrong thing you'd get punished and could potentially be imprisoned. We are now moving a world away from that to a point where not a judge with all the facts, where there is a right of reply, but a minister, who is making a decision behind closed doors, gets to determine whether they think you've done something wrong—or, not even that, whether they think you might do something wrong in the future, even though you haven't done anything wrong already.

In other words, we're moving away from a system where you do something wrong, you get brought before the courts and you get prosecuted. We are moving away from that. We are moving to a system where someone thinks you might do something wrong in the future; therefore, you get punished. That is not what other countries are doing, despite what the minister has told us. We are going further here than are places like the UK in dealing with the threat of terrorism and, in so doing, some very basic principles of individual liberty and the rule of law are slipping from our grasp.

The attempt to move this bill in its current form is clearly an attempt by the government to wedge Labor. It's nothing more than that. You can absolutely see that, because the government was prepared to introduce some safeguards a little while ago and now they've backflipped. It is crystal clear to anyone who is looking at this that this government has no agenda. It was elected as a one-trick pony. That trick has happened, so now they've got to fill the rest of their time, and they are thinking, 'What can we do to try to wedge the opposition?' That much is crystal clear.

I will support the opposition's amendments to this bill, because they try to make a bad bill better. I will support the move to refer it back to the committee to try to get some of those amendments back in. I say all that in the context of us having been very concerned about the work of this committee and the closed-door deals that it does and the fact that it locks out third-party voices in this parliament. What it usually ends up doing is proposing legislation to take away people's civil liberties, which gets rammed through this place.

Let's put that aside; I'll be supporting the amendments. But I do plead with the opposition to reconsider their position if their amendments don't get up either here or in the Senate. This is what the coalition government is doing in week 2 of its term—trying to say that the minister is able to bar you from coming back into this country to live at your home or see your family, even though you've done nothing wrong. That's what they're trying to do in week 2. And if you give in now, imagine what it's going to be like at the end of three years. I and the Greens will fight hard to defend principles of rule of law and democracy and liberty in this country. Over the next three years, because we know that this government will stop at nothing—there is nothing they won't do, given that they've got no agenda; there is no line they won't cross—we are going to need to be very vigilant in this parliament in defence of some of those basic principles.

Let's go through in a bit of detail what this bill does. Under this bill the minister can issue an order to say, 'No, you are not allowed to come back into the country.' That applies to citizens as well as others. So, that's the first thing people need to know. This is going to apply to all of us. People might have in their minds, 'Oh, this only applies to someone who is potentially coming here who might have lived in another country or grown up in another country.' No. To the Australian born and bred, the Australian citizen: this will catch you. If the minister thinks you might commit an offence of a certain kind related to terrorism when you come back in here, then the minister is able to say that you're not allowed back in the country.

That is different to the United Kingdom legislation that the government has spoken about many, many times. Under the United Kingdom legislation, the idea is that you've done something that counts as a crime first. There's a test; there's a threshold. So, it's not just that someone sitting behind a desk thinks, for their own political reasons, that you might do something in the future. There is a threshold. It's much more consistent with the basic principles of the rule of law. That is not in this legislation. In other words, to get pinged under this you don't even have to have done something wrong in the first place.

The minister can also act if they get advice from ASIO. What's notable about this is that the advice from ASIO that the minister says they're acting on is not challengeable or reviewable, even by an Australian citizen. In other respects, ASIO's advice against you is challengeable. But this government has gone out of their way to say, 'No; we're going to introduce a new kind of advice from ASIO in this legislation'—where someone can just pick up the phone and say, on a nod and a wink, 'I think someone's a concern.' Then the minister can say: 'Well, that's good enough for me. I'm going to deny them entry.' And there is nothing you can do about it, as an Australian citizen, if the minister says, 'Well, I've just got this advice, so I'm going to make the decision.' There is no protection built in for you under this legislation. In the United Kingdom, before they're able to do something like this to you they go to a judge. Here, they don't have to go to a judge before they make the order, and then you, as the citizen, if the order's been made against you, don't have the right to take it to a judge afterwards.

So, this man who is sitting at the despatch box right now is the one who can determine, for every single one of us in this country, whether we're allowed back in or not, to see our home and our family. There may well be some very legitimate instances in which there are some people to whom we say, 'No, you've committed a crime; something should happen to you.' But there might be a bunch of other people who have done nothing wrong and, out of a misunderstanding, you think, 'Well, they might do something in the future.' What can you do if you get one of these orders made against you? It's why, in the United Kingdom, you can challenge these things in court. It's why a judge gets involved and why you don't give one person—this man here, the member for Dickson—the power over you and your life. But that is what this bill will do.

There would have been some safeguards in it had the amendments that came out of the committee passed. Would they have been adequate? Probably not. Would this bill have been better than what it is? Yes. But those amendments aren't in this bill. They were argued for for a very, very good reason. That is because we are slipping into something other than democracy when we give one person the unchallengeable power to say, 'You are not allowed into this country even though you are a citizen'—or even if you're not a citizen. One person could say unchallengeably, 'You as a person are not allowed into this country.' That is of grave concern.

I accept that we are dealing with complicated issues here, because there may be instances that are covered by this bill where there is someone who has done something heinous against Australian citizens—for example, being involved in a terrorist act overseas that might have claimed the lives of Australian citizens. Every one of us would want to have a discussion about how to deal with that. My and the Greens' starting point would be if someone has committed a crime, bring them back here, try them and sentence them. If they're found guilty then make them live out that punishment. That is how the law works. There is not a case where the law is broken in that respect. We can prosecute people and put them in jail if they have done things that are terrorism crimes.

This bill goes much, much further than that. It also deals with the complicated question of children. This bill will apply to people as young as 14. Someone as young as 14 could get caught by this. When you're dealing with children, you're most likely to be dealing with something where it's actually the parents who have made the decision on behalf of the children and it's not the children themselves who are at fault. To say Minister Dutton has the unchallengeable power to keep a child out of the country because of something that their parents might have done is an affront.

Again, I accept that these are complicated questions. Whether it's an innocent child who's now having the sins of the father visited upon them or someone who has committed a heinous offence overseas that everyone in this country would think is appalling, there are many from across the spectrum who argue that the best thing to do with those people is bring them back here, try them and put them in jail. This stops it. This says Australia can not only keep them away—and I stress there are going to be two categories of people who are caught by this. There'll be the ones who have committed crimes or done wrong, which most people in this country would think deserve to be punished, and then there are going to be other innocent people who've done nothing wrong at all but that the minister has decided—perhaps out of mistaken identity, who knows—to make an order against. But we'll never find out about it, because you're never going to be able to bring this case to court; you're never going to have any daylight shone on it. We will never know if, tomorrow, the minister decides to keep people out of the country who've done nothing wrong unless a journalist tells us about it. We will never know.

So there are those two categories of people who are caught by this but, with those who have done wrong and who most people in the country would accept have done wrong, you have to question whether or not you say, 'No, we're going to close our doors to you rather than bring you in here and try you under our judicial system.' What are they going to do? Where are they going to stay? Do you really think the world will be a safe place if Australia decides that, rather than bringing back someone who has committed a terrorist act against Australian citizens—while they were on holiday, for example—and trying them and putting them in jail, we will shut our door and let them roam the world?

Is that really what we're saying? Is that really how we're going to make the world a safer place? No.

There are people across the political spectrum who are saying countries should not be allowed to shut their door to their own citizens who've done wrong and that those countries should be responsible for taking them back and prosecuting them. But that's not this minister's approach. This minister's approach is to make the world a less safe place by saying: 'To people who've done something wrong and committed a heinous act, well, we don't care where you go next as long as it's not here. We're going to shut the door. If you go and commit a crime somewhere else, well, you can't blame us.'

Lastly, I again plead with the opposition. This is going to be the first in many of these wedges. If you give in now, it is only going to get worse. This is about democracy. This is about the rule of law. This is about individual liberties and those difficult balancing acts. We cannot support this bill as it stands.

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